I just was in an extended argument with my two daughters, about something I suspect might be a generational thing.  Let me know what you think.

So the discussion started with me complaining that "because" Google respects neither uppercase/lowercase nor punctuation in their email, I get lots of email addressed to people whose email is similar to mine.  I myself have always thought that the problem was that Google's email address parser did not respect these differences, as they should, and so I wind up receiving email meant for someone in Great Britain with a similar name.

My daughters argued vigorously that this is not a bug but a feature -- you wouldn't want people to have to pay attention to either cases or punctuation when you write your email!

I replied that back when there was a net but no web of course you paid attention to these differences: we were all trained as programmers to be careful about punctuation and case.  (Hell, I learned on punch cards.)

Their view was that this was a dumb view and that I wasn't in fact getting email for everyone who signed up for email with some version of peter.king.1@gmail.com, but also peterking1@gmail.com, peterking.1@gmail.com, and so on, but only when other people -- like, say, peter.king.11@gmail.com -- mistyped their email addresses when signing up for some service or other (for instance leaving off the last digit).

The discussion was inconclusive, to say the least, and I thought (and think!) that we should respect case and punctuation.  But I certainly hadn't considered the arguments against it...

Thoughts?  Experiences with gmail?  Reflections on generational differences in the approach to computing?

-- 
Peter King			 	peter.king@utoronto.ca
Department of Philosophy
170 St. George Street #521
The University of Toronto		    (416)-978-3311 ofc
Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
       CANADA

http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/

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